The first movie star was a woman named Florence Lawrence. The doe-eyed, dark-haired actress was a household name — until she was horribly burned in a studio fire. She attempted to make a Hollywood comeback at 29. And at 34. And at 40. None of them worked. So finally, in 1938, at age 52, she committed suicide by eating ant paste. But Lawrence kicked the bucket years before Perez Hilton was around to post a picture of her with the words “Just Die Already, Flo!!” scrawled across her forehead. There was no Chris Cocker to don a set of fake eyelashes and shoot a weepy, snot-strewn YouTube video titled “Leave Florence Alone.” US Weekly, Star, and In Touch didn’t exist, so they couldn’t put Lawrence on the cover of commemorative double issues that would cost three times the amount of the normal newsstand price. In that sense, she was lucky.

I suspect there’s an excellent chance that the advent of modern public relations might have saved Lawrence’s life. (Edward Bernays didn’t popularize the field until 10 years after the actress killed herself.) But though it’s too late to help the earliest of celluloid heroes, the right crisis-management techniques and some controlled hype can still work wonders for Britney Spears.

The career of my generation’s enfant terrible starlet is currently stuck in permanent shit-show mode. When a teenaged Spears was burped into the limelight in 1998, you could tell she knew exactly what she was after. Now 25, she can no longer stomach the level of fame she’s invented for herself. According to Kelly Cutrone, a former talent publicist and the founder and CEO of People’s Revolution PR, a New York City–based fashion publicity firm, when Spears lost control, the poison pens and paparazzi took it over for her. “Everybody is really attuned to showing what a manic-depressive, bipolar, poor-mother mess this girl is,” says Cutrone. “Everybody’s building on it and building on it, and stalking her, and running around getting pictures of her, and just waiting for ‘the moment’ to line up.”

Yet despite her ongoing penchant for irresponsible partying, her astoundingly ill-timed VMA performance, her poor driving record (she turned herself into police this week to be booked on hit-and-run and driving-without-a-license charges), and — the definition of rock bottom — the loss of custody of her two sons to ex-husband Kevin Federline, Spears’s new single “Gimme More” seems to have hit pop pay dirt: the song landed in the number-one slot on the Billboard Hot Digital Songs chart the week of its release. And Blackout, her fifth album, drops on October 30. So there’s still hope.

Most Americans get off on a good redemption story, and Spears would make a darling poster girl — but can she just stop parading her naked vagina around like a beauty-queen’s crown long enough to turn things around? We think yes, and in an effort to offer encouraging comfort to the Louisiana lout, the Phoenix came up with a field guide to celebrity comebacks. Our hot mess of a pop princess is stalled in Category One at the moment, though that’s not to say she won’t rise from the ashes any day now. So toss the dramakaze and step off, bitches — even Britney can go for the comeback gold.

Britney Spears and Michael Jackson fight it out Cue up track six on the new Britney (Jive) and prepare yourself for the Technicolor disco flash-back of the year, swooning string section, chunky Nile Rodgers guitar riff, and all. The song's called "Anticipating," and it captures the most famous 19-year-old girl in the world at her guileless, sentimental best.

YO, JONNY! THE LOVE SONG OF JONNY VALENTINE | February 05, 2013 Sometime after becoming a YouTube megastar and crashing into the cult of personality that has metastasized in contemporary society, Teddy Wayne's 11-year-old bubblegum idol Jonny Valentine is hanging out in his dressing room getting a blow job from a girl who doesn't even like his music.

LENA DUNHAM AND HBO GET IT RIGHT | April 13, 2012 When a new television show chronicling the lives of young women arrives, it tends to come packaged with the promise that it will expertly define them, both as a generation and a gender.

EUGENIDES'S UPDATED AUSTEN | October 12, 2011 For his long-awaited third novel, Jeffrey Eugenides goes back to look at love in the '80s — and apparently decides that it's a lot like love in the early 19th century.

REVIEW: RINGER | September 08, 2011 Sixty seconds into the CW's new psychological thriller Ringer, star Sarah Michelle Gellar is seen running from a masked attacker in the darkness.

LOVE'S LEXICOGRAPHER | February 10, 2011 As the editorial director at Scholastic, David Levithan is surrounded by emotional stories about adolescents. Being overexposed to such hyperbolic feelings about feelings could easily turn a writer off pursuing such ventures himself — despite the secrets he may have picked up along the way.